YOU’RE GETTING MARRIED

The Wal-Martization of the bridal business.

Every year in the United States there are about 2.3 million marriages, and to the members of the North American Bridal Association, a trade organization for bridal retailers and wholesalers, each of those marriages represents evidence of the sovereignty of love in a world generally governed by harsher passions, proof of an urge toward commitment in a short-attention-span culture, and a demonstration of the endurance of traditional family structures. It also represents a marketing opportunity. For every vow exchanged there is, it is hoped, a sweeping gown of satin and tulle to be sold; for every aisle walked, a trailing cloud of veil. Every kiss bestowed at the altar, under the huppah, or before the justice of the peace is, potentially, an occasion for the use of a silver-plated wedding-cake knife or a leather-bound guest book or a frilly lace garter threaded with blue ribbon. The average American bride and groom together spend twenty-two thousand dollars on the day that sees them transformed into man and wife, and each new union is filled not just with cordial hope but with the promise of profit.

How is a bridal retailer to make the most of that opportunity? This was the question addressed at a seminar entitled “Winning Bridal Strategies,” which was held not long ago at a semiannual trade show in Las Vegas, at which bridal-store owners from around the country view the latest in wedding-dress designs, place orders, share gossip, and pick up business-management skills. The bridal market was held at the Tropicana Hotel—one of the less luxurious of the city’s resorts, its main attraction being not a scale model of the Eiffel Tower or an indoor replica of the Grand Canal but a ticktacktoe-playing chicken against which a challenger stood to win up to ten thousand dollars. For five days last September, the hotel looked like backstage at a Moonie mass wedding. There was a dizzying range of wedding dresses from designers whose exotic names—Janell Berté, Lorrie Kabala, Aurora D’Paradiso—seemed culled from the register at an expensive international school. In display cases, there were enough tiaras to restore every deposed monarchy in history. The endless amount of product appeared, to the untrained eye, deceptively similar and induced, after a few hours, what bridal-store owners call “white blindness.” Retailers, however, could discern important distinctions among gowns when it came to stitching, boning, and the ease with which a wearer would be able to “Y.M.C.A.” at her reception.

The seminar featured a Tennessee-based motivational speaker named Chip Eichelberger, whose résumé noted that he got his start in the business by working for Anthony Robbins, the best-selling author of “Awaken the Giant Within.” “I am excited to be here, and I am challenged to be here,” Eichelberger announced, as he bounded to the front of the hotel conference room. He kicked things off by asking the members of the audience—who were, as is typical for the wedding-retail business, mostly women in their middle years—to give their nearest neighbor a back rub. Next, he launched into a peppy exhortation filled with attention-getting, counterintuitive statements.

“People say you should satisfy the customer, but setting out to satisfy the bride is a losing game,” he said. The bridal-store owners, who had paid $199 each to listen to Eichelberger, looked puzzled. “Satisfaction is mediocrity. If you set the bar at satisfaction, some people on your team will set out to satisfy. You have to set up a system to exceed expectations. You’ve got to think, How can I provide a better experience for the bride?” The store owners scribbled down his words. He explained some of the rudiments of salesmanship, and how they applied to the bridal business. “Some salespeople start at the lower end instead of at the high end,” he said. “If you get them excited about the three-hundred-dollar dress, it’s hard to get them excited about the thousand-dollar dress.” A bride’s anxiety—about her dress, about her mother-in-law, about the man she’s marrying—should be greeted as providing an opening for the self-assured salesperson. “A lot of people are scared going into marriage, and if you can transfer your certainty, that’s good for you,” Eichelberger said. Stores should send e-mails to brides who came to browse but have yet to buy—“There’s a difference between being pushy and following up,” he said—and they should consider traditional seduction techniques. “After every weekend is over, hire some kid with a bike for eight dollars an hour and have him ride around and deliver a single rose to everyone who placed an order,” Eichelberger went on. “There’s nothing wrong with inducing a little reciprocation, if it’s done elegantly. I would wager that’s why a lot of brides buy from a salon: because the consultant spent so much time with them. You have to help them buy what they really want, not what they need.”

Most of all, he urged, consultants shouldn’t let what he called the “ ‘Oh, Mommy’ moment” pass them by. “When the bride comes out of the dressing room and looks at herself in the mirror and says, ‘Oh, Mommy,’ you need to say, ‘Let’s write it up,’ ” Eichelberger said. “You owe it to them. Do they really want to go to nine other appointments at nine other stores? Of course, they don’t. You’re cheating them if you don’t say it.” Eichelberger also suggested that retailers should work on themselves. “The best gift you can give your family and your brides is your own personal growth,” he said. Store owners should involve their employees in bonding rituals, beginning each day with a football huddle and a declared commitment to go out and do serious business. “Motion creates emotion!” Eichelberger said, and told everyone to stand up and punch her hand in the air and say “Yes!”—at which seventy ladies with blow-dried hair stood up and punched seventy manicured fists skyward.

The wedding industry, like the funeral industry, is something most ordinary people don’t think about until it’s too late not to. Just as with a funeral, preparing for a wedding is an emotionally charged journey into an unfamiliar territory of arcane practices, all of which appear to be the intimidating preserve of experts and specialists. The bride-to-be, whose initial ignorance of what her nuptial role entails is matched only by her anxiety that she play it to perfection, is one of the most assiduously courted customers in America, where, according to a recent survey by the Condé Nast Bridal Group, the wedding business is worth nearly forty billion dollars a year. That figure includes expenditure not just on long white dresses but on all the accoutrements of the wedding: the catering services and floral arrangements and officiants’ fees and rental of banquet halls just large enough to seat all the couple’s parents’ friends but not quite large enough to fit in most of their own. If you add the national outlay on honeymoons and gifts, wedding-related expenditure comes to fifty billion dollars a year. Bridal-industry sources like to point out that the amount that is spent on weddings is more than the national revenues of McDonald’s and PepsiCo; it is also far greater than the gross domestic product of, for example, the Bahamas ($5 billion) or Aruba ($2 billion), or of many other island nations to whose beaches the newlyweds are likely to repair after the ceremony is over.

The size and reach of the American wedding industry belies the fact that the bridal business is what Gary Wright, the head of an industry association called the National Bridal Service, describes as “the purest example of an inelastic market.” The number of weddings taking place annually has remained static for the past two decades, which troubles bridal retailers. As Wright puts it, “No one yet has found a way to increase the demand. No one ever says, ‘This is a great time to get married—the bridal store is having a sale.’ ” Similarly unnerving to the bridal industry is the changing demographics of marriage. Brides are getting older and are more likely to have been married before, both of which, it is feared, make them less susceptible to the allures of traditional bridal trappings: the “Oh, Mommy” moment may not have quite the same impact when the bride herself is already a mommy.

There are other problems facing the country’s three thousand independent bridal retailers, who cling proudly to their mom-and-pop status, even though the stores are usually run only by mom—who, having married off her own daughter, thinks it might be fun to marry off other people’s—while pop keeps well out of the way. The biggest threat is presented by a chain store called David’s Bridal, which has been greeted by independents with all the enthusiasm shown by small booksellers toward Barnes & Noble or by general stores toward Wal-Mart. David’s has a hundred and eighty-one locations around the country and is expanding rapidly: already, twenty per cent of all American bridal gowns are purchased at David’s. The chain, which is owned by the May Department Stores Company, is the first store to sell wedding dresses in the manner of mass-market ready-to-wear clothing. Although many independent bridal stores do stock some off-the-rack dresses, the traditional method of buying a wedding dress has required the bride to try on the store’s sample gowns and place an order for a new dress, which can take as long as six months to be delivered by the manufacturer and will require alterations at additional cost. David’s dresses can be bought in sizes 2 through 26, and retail for an average of about five hundred dollars.

Many independent retailers have decided that their only hope for survival is to emphasize their specialized knowledge, and to persuade each bride-to-be that dressing herself for her wedding is a project that she is about as well equipped to undertake as she is to remove her own appendix. Vows, the trade magazine for bridal retailers, regularly features articles suggesting how such persuasion might be effected. “Pay attention to the verbal and nonverbal clues the wedding party gives,” Steve Lang, the president of Mon Cheri Bridals, advises in an article entitled “Seven Steps to Closing a Sale.” “You are like a doctor watching vital signs. You adjust the use of selling tools and approach as a doctor would change treatments based on patient response.” The undecided bride should be urged to leave a twenty-five-dollar refundable deposit so that the retailer can “continue to research the dress you love” until she returns to the store, because, as Lang points out, “taking money is a much more intimate relationship than just giving a business card to someone.”

The average American bride spends eight hundred dollars on her dress, though many gowns retail for thousands, such as those by the designer Vera Wang, who claims to create three new shades of white for every new collection, a feat deserving of a Nobel Prize in Physics. After a bride has been sold on a dress, a retailer should press for further sales: a rule of thumb is that whatever a bride has paid for her dress she should spend over again on shoes, undergarments, jewelry, and other fripperies. The necessity of cumbersome accessories should be explained to the bride, even as she sensibly resists their suggestion. “The most common reason brides don’t buy a purse is because they don’t want to carry it around on their wedding day,” one bridal retailer told Vows. “Admittedly, this is a difficult objection to combat, but you still need to try.” Long white gloves should be advocated, even though they present an obstruction to the crucial symbolic moment of marrying. The suggested solution: a left-hand glove slit at the fourth finger, so that a groom can put the ring on his bride without messing up her look.

The romance that the retailer is most interested in promoting is not the one between bride and groom but that between bride and gown. Kleinfeld, the wedding-dress retail store in Brooklyn, greets women who make an appointment with a letter that announces, “We believe the day you choose your wedding gown should be as joyful and memorable as the day you wear it.”

One evening last fall, hundreds of young women attended a Bridal Expo at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in Times Square. After standing in long lines to enter, they swarmed the scores of booths that were occupied by dress venders, linen and tableware companies, jewellers, tuxedo- and limousine-rental companies, and representatives of every imaginable division of the bridal business. The highlight of the evening was a catwalk show of bridal fashions. But, before the show began, a mistress of ceremonies poked fun at the few sheepish-looking men who had dared to attend. “Have you noticed how, from the minute you put that ring on her finger, your fiancée starts suffering from P.M.S.?” she said. “I mean premarital syndrome. She has lost all interest in things that aren’t to do with her wedding day. You’ve got to understand: She already had the dress picked out, she had the church picked out, she had the music picked out. You were the last element she picked out.”

The contemporary conception of the betrothal period as an extended occasion for retail consumption and elaborate event production is a boon for wedding professionals, among whose gloomier number are those who have feared that the traditional American wedding may be going the way of the traditional American nuclear family. Happily, the opposite seems to be true. Apart from a brief, alarming moment in the nineteen-seventies when dress manufacturers stooped to the demands of hippie brides by offering bridal blouses rather than dresses, weddings have only got bigger and grander, as if the extravagance of the ceremony might keep at bay the hobgoblin of divorce statistics.

However, the bride who approaches her engagement with the fervor of a war planner combined with the giddiness of an Oscar winner is, for the bridal professional, not just an opportunity but a liability. “Brides don’t want the fun to end,” says Barbara Barrett, the owner of the Bridal Mall, in Niantic, Connecticut, her voice heavy with weariness. When Barrett opened the store, in 1993, her typical customer came in for an average of two visits before she bought her dress. Nowadays, a bride averages five visits before settling on a gown.

The Bridal Mall is the largest bridal store in Connecticut, where brides-to-be can choose among about eight hundred different styles of wedding gowns—from enormous, pouffy productions that weigh twenty pounds and look like bead-encrusted pup tents to flimsy slips with spaghetti straps and layers of chiffon that seem less suited to the altar than to the honeymoon suite. Barrett doesn’t just sell wedding dresses: her brides can also order engraved invitations, multitiered cakes, and floral arrangements; they can outfit bridesmaids and, from the tuxedo-rental department, intended spouses and their attendants. Barrett also provides, for a fee, services such as pre-ceremony gown storage, with visitation rights included: on busy weekend afternoons, the Bridal Mall looks like a petting zoo, filled with brides-to-be and their friends and relatives, all cooing over the tulle.

For Barrett, as for any bridal-store owner, part of the job’s reward is the intangible joy of sending a happy bride into her marital life. Yet the structure of the bridal industry conspires to frustrate both bride and retailer; while they appear to be collaborating on a grand romantic project, their economic interests are very different. The bride is afraid that her naïveté will be exploited; the retailer is on guard against the bride who is shopping but isn’t buying. A cycle of resentment can easily be established, which, though it is usually masked by the air of sentimentality that thickens the oxygen in a bridal store, sometimes breaks out into real hostilities. Not long ago, one of the Bridal Mall’s customers flung an unwanted garter at Barrett after being reminded of the store’s no-returns policy; and last summer Barrett was sued in small-claims court by a bride who contended that the fit of her dress had restricted her ability to dance at her wedding reception, twelve months earlier, a trauma that had persisted throughout her first year of marriage.

On a recent Saturday afternoon, a steady flow of brides arrived at the Bridal Mall. First-time visitors were asked to fill out a form including the date of the wedding: a bride without a date is instantly suspect, since she may well also lack a fiancé. Brides are also discreetly asked about their dress budget. More affluent customers are steered to the “couture room,” which is spacious and painted purple and furnished with a sofa and chairs and soft lighting and plates of butter cookies, and where the cheapest gown costs twenty-five hundred dollars. On this particular day, Barrett had one customer for the couture room, a twenty-seven-year-old attorney from New Haven who, on an earlier visit, had found a dress she favored and had returned for a second look with her punkish younger sister (and future bridesmaid), who had black-and-blond-dyed hair. The bride’s choice was an enormous gown that looked as if it might have been designed by a cartoonist for Disney: it had a scalloped neckline and a crinoline so wide it would have been sufficient to support a parachute jump. It cost $2,899. “This is the only time in my life I’ll be able to wear a big dress,” the bride-to-be said. “And this is going to sound gay, but when I was a kid I loved the dresses on ‘Gone with the Wind’ so much.”

Brides with fewer resources are directed to the main salon, where dresses cost from $299 to $1,499. A hang tag is attached to each dress, showing three levels of pricing, depending on whether the bride chooses gown storage or post-wedding preservation services; also attached is a booklet of coupons with discounts on items such as cake toppers and toasting glasses. One function of the different pricing levels is to confuse the bride who is bent on comparison shopping. Barbara Barrett cuts the manufacturers’ labels out of the dresses in the main salon, and won’t tell a bride who designed her chosen dress until she has paid for it. She also does not permit cameras or video recorders in the store. “We’ve had people videotaping through their purses,” Barrett says. “Like they were from ‘60 Minutes,’ ” Barrett’s husband, Chris, adds.

Such tactics are intended to discourage brides from using Barrett’s as a dressing room before taking their business to a competing store or buying a dress online. “Brides used to come in with their mothers, and their attitude about the bridal consultant was ‘This lady is going to help us have the most beautiful wedding, because she is a professional,’ ” Barrett said. “Now they come in and they’re, like, ‘Look, lady, I’ve been on the Internet, and don’t tell me you can’t go lower than six hundred and nineteen dollars on this dress, because I know you didn’t pay that much for it.’ This is a scary person to deal with.” But because of the chain-store alternative offered by David’s Bridal—there are four branches in the geographical area that Barrett serves—Barrett cannot afford to treat her more difficult customers with the sternness she thinks they deserve. Barrett’s animus against David’s is so strong that she will not allow a garment bag bearing the store’s name to enter her shop, even if the bride carrying it is prepared to spend cash on a veil-and-tiara ensemble. “Store owners weren’t so down and dirty ten years ago, because there was plenty of business for everyone,” Barrett says, bitterly. “It has ceased being a ladies’ business.”

As happens every weekend, there were, on this occasion, some crises: the bride whose wedding was two weeks off and had been provided with a bridesmaid’s dress that was too small (Barrett said they would alter the dress to fit); the first-time visitor who, having undressed in the changing room, informed her consultant that she had no intention of wearing a bra, now or at the ceremony. (Barrett instructed the flustered young consultant to tell the customer that bras are required while trying on gowns, “for health reasons.”) There was a cancellation from a girl who had been in five times already to try on gowns, each time with a different set of friends. There was a young bride who, having tried on a Maggie Sottero gown with a beaded bodice and a lace-up back, had been “loaded up,” in the parlance of the store, with a cathedral-length veil, chunky-heeled shoes, and a tiara. (Barrett sells between three and five silver-plated crystal tiaras a week, at an average of $249 each. “This is the piece that pays the bills,” she says.) The young bride’s mother, sister, and cousin all urged her to say yes to the dress, even though her wedding was still sixteen months away. There were lighthearted moments, too, such as the bride who made her selection with the help of two friends armed with paddles marked 1 through 10, like judges at a skating contest. Whenever a sales consultant closed a deal with a bride, she rushed out of the dressing area toward the other consultants clustered at the checkout counter, holding up three fingers above her head in the shape of a W, for “win.” A failed sales pitch would end in a sorry L-shaped hand gesture, for “lose.”

There was, thankfully, more than one “Oh, Mommy” moment. One customer was a twenty-eight-year-old music teacher who arrived at the store with her mother and sister, needing a dress in a hurry. She’d been engaged for just a week, and the wedding was planned for June, only three and a half months away. The groom was thirty-nine, and also a teacher. “He told the priest who’s going to marry them, ‘I’m not afraid of commitment. I’m afraid of divorce,’ ” the mother-in-law-to-be said, solemnly. The bride, her dark hair piled on top of her head and a string of pearls around her neck, tried on six dresses, the last of which had a scooped, off-the-shoulder neckline, a tight bodice, and a full skirt, and was decorated with white lace flowers. She perched on a footstool provided so that a bride who isn’t Julia Roberts’s height can get some idea of what she’ll look like when she’s in her own gown rather than a sample, and gazed at herself in the wall-size mirrors.

“This is my dress,” she said dreamily, smoothing the skirt repeatedly with her hands, while her damp-eyed mother looked on. The bride said she was thinking of her fiancé. “I am seeing him in my mind and picturing his reaction,” she said. “This is the one that will make him forget to breathe.”

The big white dress was firmly established as proper bridal wear in the United States by the end of the nineteenth century. Though brides had worn white in earlier eras, it was Queen Victoria’s choice of a white silk-and-lace gown with an eighteen-foot train for her wedding to Prince Albert, in 1840, that confirmed the necessity of the costume. The notion that every woman in the American Republic should look, on her wedding day, like a member of European royalty is the principle upon which David’s Bridal was founded. “We basically serve the masses at David’s Bridal,” explains Robert Huth, David’s C.E.O., who is based at David’s headquarters, in Conshohocken, just outside Philadelphia. The company occupies a handsomely renovated foundry building with stripped beams and exposed-brick walls, a fancy cafeteria, a staff gymnasium, and cubicles and conference rooms whose calm hum is indistinguishable from that of a prosperous insurance office. “In many cases, this is the most expensive apparel purchase our customer has made to date,” Huth says. “It may be the most expensive she will ever make. She wants to feel special. She is living her dream, in many ways.”

David’s Bridal was conceived by Phil Youtie, who, in the nineteen-seventies, was the owner of a small chain of traditional bridal stores in Florida, and one of the relatively few men in the business. (The original David was one David Reisberg, who sold Youtie his first bridal store.) In 1990, Youtie joined forces with his best friend from high school, a financier named Steven Erlbaum, to open a wedding-dress outlet store in a warehouse on I-95 outside Hallandale, Florida. Youtie and Erlbaum sold off-price merchandise at a deep discount, and the only frills were the ones on the dresses. “We did no alterations, and if anyone needed a bobby pin we would charge them for it,” Youtie explained recently. Within a year, David’s Bridal was buying all its dresses directly from manufacturers in Taiwan, where most American wedding dresses originated then. These days, David’s dresses are made not only in China but in Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka, where the company established its own factory a few years ago. “The factory has to be spotless and air-conditioned, because you can’t have people perspiring all over white garments,” Youtie explains. “Everyone looks like scrub-room nurses, and when we first opened in Sri Lanka the workers kept catching colds because they weren’t used to the air-conditioning.”

The market of brides who were pleased to have an alternative to the rounds of appointments and ordering and alterations offered by the traditional bridal salons allowed David’s to expand dramatically over the next decade, and in 1999 Youtie and Erlbaum took their company public for more than a hundred million dollars. A year later, David’s was bought by the May Department Stores Company for four hundred and thirty-six million dollars; the company plans to open about thirty more stores a year for the next five years.

Under May’s direction, David’s has continued an evolution away from its original, bargain-basement image: the new stores are decorated in peach and sage green, and have the bland conformity of an Ann Taylor store. Some special-order dresses bearing the name of the designer Oleg Cassini have been introduced, but the company’s primary appeal remains to the budget bride, with her customary tolerance for the rustle of polyester, the scratch of nylon lace, and the sparkle of plastic beading.

The democratization of princessdom promised by David’s has, predictably, a substantial business rationale for the May Company, whose C.E.O., Gene Kahn, intends to build the largest bridal business in the country. After buying David’s, the May Company purchased Priscilla’s of Boston, a high-end company with a chain of ten stores and a good, if languishing, reputation (the company’s last big moment was dressing Tricia Nixon for her White House wedding); a tuxedo-rental chain; and a five-million-dollar stake in the bridal Web site The Knot. Information about every David’s bride is gathered and tabulated, so that the company’s anticipation of bridal needs can be more precisely refined. “Tuxedos generally get bought five to six months after the wedding gown; bridesmaids’ dresses, three to four months,” says Gary Schwartz, the senior vice-president of marketing for David’s. With these data, David’s is able to send e-mail reminders to its brides at the appropriate moment, advising them of special offers and urging them to return to the store. “The May Company said, ‘Hey, you know what? There are opportunities to influence and generate income from other aspects of the wedding-planning process,’ ” Schwartz says.

The May Company’s intention is not simply to dominate the bridal business. “They bought us for two very solid reasons,” Huth says. “One is our ability to grow and be profitable and be a major contributor in our own right. The other is to give them an entrée to a younger customer who is forming a household and needs many of the products they offer.” The bride is, in effect, a loss leader for May’s bridal registry, which is promoted to David’s brides by means of discount coupons and advertising. A David’s bride is thus a means by which the department store can tap into her guest list, a much larger pool of potential customers for its cookware and appliances. “The number of brides they can put through our door is a lead generator for all the processes after,” as Gary Schwartz puts it. According to the Condé Nast Bridal Group wedding survey, the average American engagement lasts sixteen months, and during this time couples shop for four billion dollars’ worth of furniture, three billion dollars’ worth of housewares, and four hundred million dollars’ worth of tableware. While the bride’s fling with a David’s store amounts to a brief and heady romance, the May Company is hoping for a retail relationship till death does them part.

Faced with such competition, independent bridal-store owners have been obliged to be imaginative about new marketing possibilities. In particular, they are looking for ways to appeal to the so-called nontraditional bride: divorced brides, older brides, and brides with offspring. To the independent retailer, such customers present a challenge, but one that should be greeted enthusiastically. Vows’ tipoffs for recognizing the nontraditional bride included the fact that “these women won’t change their wedding dates to accommodate dress orders,” and they are dangerously apt “to forget the wedding and prepare for marriage.”

Bridal specialists have a vested interest in the high incidence of both marriage and divorce, and speak of their returning brides with an exasperated fondness, like an indulgent parent. In the past, a second-time or third-time bride would generally have a low-key ceremony to inaugurate a new marriage, but such modesty has fallen out of fashion, much to the relief of the industry. Cami Hester, a bridal-store owner in Melbourne, Florida, and a frequent contributor to Bridalindustry.com, a bulletin board for the trade, says, “We have one bride we have done seven weddings for already, and every time, the dress gets whiter and the train gets longer.”

The bridal industry has taken to promoting the idea that you don’t even have to be divorced to enjoy a splashy second wedding. The emerging phenomenon of vow renewal is, potentially, a hopeful sign for retailers, though it should be admitted that, so far, the trend seems largely to exist in the minds of marketing executives at resort hotels, such as the Don Cesar, in St. Petersburg, Florida, which last year hosted a mass renewal of vows on the beach at sunset for two hundred couples and reporters from the St. Petersburg Times and the Tampa Tribune.

Still, bridal retailers know that such events are rare, and that they would be wise to concentrate on actually sending women to the altar to undergo a legally binding ceremony, not least because a satisfied customer may one day be legally unbound. Retailers are aware of the need to keep in mind the question posed in a recent issue of Vows: “Are you reaching the future remarriage market by serving the current generation’s brides well?”

On the last evening of the Las Vegas Bridal Market, industry members came together to celebrate a specially orchestrated wedding. Because the market coincided with the first anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks, its chairman, Randy Friedman, of the North American Bridal Association, had decided that a fitting way to commemorate the day would be to donate an entire wedding to a Las Vegas firefighter and his bride. Last May, the name of Ken Teeters, Jr., a thirty-five-year-old member of the Las Vegas Fire Department, was drawn out of a firefighter’s boot. His fiancée was Destiny Esposito, a thirty-three-year-old editor with the film-advertising company the Ant Farm.

Ken and Destiny were, in many ways, a couple who had made do quite well without marriage or a wedding. They had been dating on and off for fifteen years, and were in the midst of renovating a house they had recently bought together. “I don’t think either of us has quite figured out why we didn’t get married before,” Ken, who is tall and ruddy, said at the wedding rehearsal, as he affably accepted the beers with which his friends kept supplying him. “Hopefully, it won’t make any difference to us, being married, because everything works real well as it is. It’s really just a piece of paper.” Destiny, who has long blond hair and an athletic grace, said, “We’ve been together forever. We’ve been engaged a few times, and we’ve had to put it on hold. But winning this wedding gave us the push we needed.”

On the evening of the wedding, a hundred and fifty of Ken and Destiny’s friends and relatives gathered on rows of white seats on one side of the Tropicana’s large, irregularly shaped pool, while the bridal conventioneers massed on the farther bank, looking on. As dusk fell, a bridal march was struck up on the sound system, and Destiny’s five bridesmaids, in dresses provided by Mori Lee, walked down past the hotel’s bridal chapel, through the artificial grottoes, past the fake waterfalls, and down to the pool. Destiny, in her donated outfit of an ivory-colored Alfred Angelo gown, a veil by Bel Aire, and Dyeables shoes, and carrying sunflowers and Gerber daisies that had been supplied by Amazon Events, a local décor company, was escorted along the red carpet by her father. Ken, who was wearing his dress uniform, looked on with a grin.

Destiny’s sister, Bliss Esposito, read a poem she had written, called “They Won a Wedding,” which ribbed the couple for their protracted courtship. “So today here we stand, too late to falter, with Kenny and Des finally at the altar,” Bliss read. “They’re surrounded by loved ones, some close to tears, and, oh, did I mention the fifteen hundred conventioneers?” Justice Michael Cherry, who had offered his services after reading about the planned wedding in the local newspaper, pronounced them man and wife.

Bride and groom embraced and kissed, and everyone applauded—both those who actually knew the couple and those for whom Ken and Destiny were an astonishing instance of that which is axiomatically impossible: a couple who had been persuaded to wed by the wedding industry itself. It was a very moving moment, and tears of happiness were shed on both sides of the chlorinated depths. ♦

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